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Saturday, February 27, 2010

More Futurological Snark

Yesterday I recounted with amusement my reaction to a "transhumanist-bioethicist" who wanted to know if I thought "we should clone Neanderthals." I snarked in closing that I would be pleased to know just who is presumably included in that "we" -- inasmuch as cloning Neanderthals isn't exactly in the offing as far as I can tell.

Someone has earnestly commented in the Moot, however, that the "we" in question refers to "society" or "humanity" and has made it clear, further, that it is a matter of some moment to him that this monolithic social or humanistic "we" should declare in a resounding voice "No!" to the futurological aspirants who would clone Neanderthals.

Now, not to be too arch about it, but I really do think it is worse than wrongheaded to assemble a congress, even an imaginary one, to say "no" to that which reality itself presently affords nothing like a going "yes."

I really disagree that there are many if any questions of actual moment in the actual present on which approvals or disapprovals have an actual impact that are ever clarified through a turn to deliberations on the not-existent-treated-as-existent. Frankly, I have come to disagree that there are moral or technical principles even in the abstract that are better clarified through recourse to the immaterial question "if it could be done should Neanderthals be cloned?" than could be clarified instead through recourse to deliberations on moral, technical, regulatory quandaries associated with any of a host of actually-existing problems in the world.

I my response in the Moot I elaborated further:

Even if some "we" proposed to "let" some scientist clone some Neanderthal, this outcome would no more actually eventuate for now from that "letting" than would the encouragement of some other "we," however enthusiastic, actually put a space hotel in orbit. We do not live a world of cloned Neanderthals or Space Hotels, we live in a world of human and weapons trafficking, of resource descent, and of rising Greenhouse storms.

Futurologists -- whether the suave neoliberal/neoconservative corporate-militarist apologists of DARPA and The Rand Corporation and GBN and IFTF, or the batshit-crazy Robot Cultists of the Extro-IEET-SIAI-Kurzweil-h+-Lifeboat-cryonics-SENS-Drextech transhumanist archipelago -- are all of them indulging in a host of proxy/distraction discourses disavowing the stakes of current problems and policies together with hysterical hyperbolic advertising-Public Relations discourses all in the service of incumbent interests and in the name of "foresight" better named fraud.

Their speculative fictions and scenarios and games are "speculative" less in the sense of critical thought than in the sense of financial speculation, and their futures are far closer to the ones that get traded on stock exchanges as bundled-risk pseudo-commodities than to the substantial futurity that names the openness in every present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of its stakeholders, peer-to-peer.

So I must disagree with you (and especially with your "obviously," which I think amounts to a kind of victory for the futurologists even when you disagree with them on specifics, since it concedes them a relevance their immateriality has never earned) that the question is just which stand should be taken up, negative or positive or qualified, in respect to various deranged and deranging futurological claims or aspirations or frames.

I think these claims and aspirations and frames are very much more to be exposed, condemned, and ridiculed than affirmed or denied, strictly speaking.

By way of conclusion, I will also add that I definitely disapprove of moves in which some "we" -- every we is substantiated in its exclusion of a salient "they," after all -- claims to speak in the name of "humanity" or "society." Wherever freedom prevails, wherever equity-in-diversity prevails, wherever consent prevails, and to the extent that it does, it is plurality and not some monolithicized homogenized normalized unanimized "humanity" that speaks, peer-to-peer.

It is the proper business of democratization to provide nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes, and to provide the conditions of equity-in-diversity (universal basic income, healthcare, education, housing, recourse to law and office and free expression and assembly, as well as access to reliable information) under which the scene of consent is legible and legitimate -- but it is crucial never to confuse the state of nonviolence or equity with humanity or society, when the substance of humanity and society is the proliferation of lifeways and expressivities and contestations that arise out of the security of that equity and nonviolence. It is also in that proliferation that we find futurity and taste freedom.

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